Seattle Bloggers: We're Here to Stay

I was congratulated by so many people tonight (most of whom I did NOT know or who did NOT know me). I really feel awkward taking ANY degree of credit for this event. KOMO should be very, very, very inclined to do this again and on a regular basis – it’s only going to grow and increase flow. I’m just happy to be one conduit.

If KOMO is the rallying point for bloggers to get together, become acquainted with one another, and ultimately stretch their relationships beyond special interest circles, then KOMO can and should accept that role – which could be willingly embraced by any other traditional media outlet that was just hoping to learn more about its most vocal community members and advocates (read: bloggers).

Funny thing is: just about everyone was asking about the agenda (even though there really wasn’t any), and curious to know how they were discovered in the first place. Made for great conversation starters, but also underscored my belief that serendipity is the spice of life. I’ve been dying to get out of the technology blogger echo chamber for quite some time, and felt exceedingly relieved to know few others in the room.

So, next time…

Need to have a poll to set tentative dates within a specific week. You could never accommodate everybody’s schedule, but at least you can get a better idea as to which night works best for most people on any given week (or no preference, for some).

You’ll keep your costs low and confusion at a minimum by keeping it in the same place, even if it happens to fall at different times of a week and/or month.

Don’t turn this into anything more than a social event.

I might actually tap into your WiFi, because my EVDO signal wasn’t very strong in the studio(s).

It’s a radical concept, but what about some kind of semi-UNproduced “Meet The Bloggers” show where you have someone do mini-interviews with the bloggers who show up? Bring ’em on stage, give ’em a small bit of make-up, ask ’em what they blog about, put their URL in the lower-thirds, then run the program either online (exclusively) or in some random 4AM time slot that would otherwise go to an advertisement for Girls Gone Wild Volume XXXIV. Heck, if you don’t wanna do it, I’ll set it up through my live stream next time and do it anyway. 😉

What about a table near the entrance where people can drop off a small stack of business cards, just to take a look to see who else might be there – then they might network their way through the crowd looking for the name and connections to that person?

I think we would be better off using Upcoming.org to organize attendence – it’s much more open-ended and prone to attracting even more interested bloggers.

The EVDO connection kept halving my live viewers, since Ustream doesn’t handle disconnections and reconnections very elegantly yet. Still, two people took live screen caps before I had a chance to ask. Gordon Medley took the first shot (with the group photo live), and Taylor Hornby snaped the second (with me at the anchor desk):

Then, someone else dumped a few of the group shots onto my desktop (thanks to the help of another local blogger). I didn’t catch either of their names, sadly – and I certainly couldn’t name everyone in the photo: